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Comment by higherpurpose | Hacker News Reader

Is iBeacon used for anything other than to push ads to your phone as soon as you enter a store?

I'm using an 'iBeacon' (raspberry pi) in a museum setting to nudge visitors entering a certain gallery: "if you'd like to take our Matisse audio tour…" They slide that notification and iOS opens our app directly to the audio tour.

Here's a much richer interactive tour: http://blog.estimote.com/post/77385955199/estimote-beacons-a...

Yes. For example a recent update to Automatic [1] included iBeacon support. It is supposed to make the connection between the phone and the Automatic it's self more reliable when you get into your car.

They've actually said they are the largest iBeacon deployment at the moment since they turned that feature on.

[1] http://www.automatic.com

With two or more beacons in range you can triangulate for an accuracy within centimeters. It's a key enabling technology for Augmented Reality. It's also how you're going to talk to ambient environmental controls and retrofit older buildings with situational awareness (thalience) that allows them to be responsive to the needs of humans passing through.

Do you have any examples of this? I was excited for this use but everything I can see suggests that it is highly inaccurate:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20332856/triangulate-exa...

This is why it's bleeding edge technology. At the moment it's not very good; and it won't be for some time. To get to something useful will probably take multiple iterations.

This is why it's so exciting. If you can build something useful with the current generation of technology; it will get better.

But you said:

"With two or more beacons in range you can triangulate for an accuracy within centimeters."

it appears that is objectively not true. In fact, the technology powering iBeacons does not seem to be capable of it. So, sure, in a few year's time, a beacon-like technology that may or may not be called iBeacons will allow for accurate positioning. So what?

I've seen a demo; it was finicky and had issues and didn't do orientation.

BLE is not ideal for accurate positioning, or RSSI for that matter. That said, it works for proximity, which should be sufficient for many applications.

iBeacon doesn't give you anything useful for triangulation. Sorry. A closer beacon can give you worse signal than the one which is far. That's the nature of Blutooth.

*>> A closer beacon can give you worse signal than the one which is far.

Well, the calibration helps quite a bit.

I'm not 100% on-board with the triangulation either.

But for proximity (with the calibration), I think it is repeatable to within inches.

It still depends on the environment. If you've got any kind of obstacles, those will affect the signal strength. If a metal shelf or the bag of water I call a body is between me and a beacon, it may think I'm further away than if my phone has a direct line of sight down an aisle to the beacon. Unless you can control for all that, it's not going to be very reliable at all.

That seems to be the current push, but off the top of my head I could see museums use them for exhibits, airports for communication back to the airline on where you are in the airport (ie, you should head to the gate now, or your gate has changed).

I think you can use it for indoor navigation were GPS is useless. However I am not sure of this.

In theory it'll be much more accurate for indoor navigation than GPS, as the accuracy level should be higher (as long as there's no RF interference etc etc).

I did a trial project with the goal of walking around a lab having readings appear for each piece of equipment as you approach it. Proximity detection was terrible... as it is, I don't think it's useful for anything but very gross distance estimations. Walking into a store will likely work but even then, the distance between stores would have to be pretty significant (or else other stores are presumed to not operate the same beacons).

I want to see it used to provide an interactive map of a large store, with the ability to search for products and see where the relevant shelf is compared to your current location.

I don't know if anyone is doing this, but the technology seems accurate enough.

At a recent hackaton, my team created an app for using iBeacon for employee tracking: http://tracktimeapp.com/

Two-Factor auth?

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